Crysis 3’s New York setting not the easy way out for Crytek

“One thing I want to underline is that we did not do this because it’s easier for us,” Crytek’s director of creative development Rasmus Hojengaard stressed, speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun.

“All of the assets have been created from the ground-up. There is nothing left of the New York you saw in Crysis 2. As you saw in the demo, there’s no resemblance to what we did before.”

“I mean, the example I’ve used is let’s say there’s a war, and your hometown is bombed, and so is your friend’s. Going to see your hometown is going to be completely different from your friend’s because you already have a connection to that place versus a place you’ve never been before. Although it’s obviously not the same [with Crysis 3], it’s still a little bit of that principle.”

In a chat with Polygon, Hojengaard said Crytek really wanted to do something different this time.

“At the same time everybody was really in love with the idea of bringing heavy vegetation back into the game, like whenever you haven’t done something for a while, you want to go back and do that again,” he added.

“At the same time, there was also something cool about the urban situation, but we didn’t want to create something we had seen before. So we said why don’t we merge the two, and create an organic city, basically, an organic urban scenario.”

Crytek has a reputation to uphold graphics-wise and is working to live up to it.

“We’re still in production, but we’re doing stuff far and above what we could do in Crysis 2,” he said.

“From a technical point of view, we’re prototyping render features now that have never been seen on consoles before from any studio. We’ll need to see what we can actually use in the final game, since it all boils down to performance, but it looks pretty promising.”

The developer mentioned new vegetation and lens flare systems, as well as “parallax occlusion mapping” on consoles, something that wasn’t even possible on PC until a DirectX 11 update to Crysis 2.

“We actually managed to figure out ways to use that on console. Obviously it’s not in the exact same way as on PC, but the end result is largely the same,” Hojengaard said.

“We’ll push as much as we possibly can in the hardware performance spectrum. We want to push the high-end benchmark of what’s possible on PC, but also on consoles.”

Hit the links above to check out the full interview features for plenty more Crysis 3 action. The shooter is expected in northern spring 2013, for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.